[Mageia-discuss] About routers and switches and Mbit/s

[JA Magallón]

On 05/04/2012 11:49 PM, Marc Paré wrote:
> Le 2012-05-04 16:39, Frank Griffin a écrit :
>> On 05/04/2012 04:19 PM, Marc Paré wrote:
>>> My question is, if we are wired for 1000 Mbit/s should I be
>>> purchasing router and switches that work at this speed. I have
>>> quite frankly never really worried about this as our speed was
>>> quite decent.
>>
>> What you need to do is compare the speed of your router/switches to
>> the speed your ISP gives you. Typically, the ISP speed is the
>> bottleneck. The faster router/switches can only exceed the ISP's
>> bandwidth when you're going from machine to machine in your house,
>> which may be worth it if you do a lot of large file transfers.
>
> My ISP serves "downloads up to speeds of 6Mbps" ... I also realize
> the if using DSL that is all depends on the location of the house and
> telco hardware.
>
>>
>> And, of course, even if you upgrade the router/switches, any
>> particular system with a slower NIC won't see the benefit unless it
>> upgrades as well.
>>
>
> All of our NIC's are gigabit NIC's.
>
> So would it be worthwhile to upgrade to gigabit router/switches.
> Actually, now that I think of it, we do use my computer as the music
> server for the house ... we have 5 computers on the go at all times.
> I don't sleep much. :-)
>

As someone would say... that al depends.
For the speed from each computer to the intenet, you are safe. The ISP
speed is the limit.

If you talk about moving files between computers inside your home, you
should try to keep gigabit interconnection everywhere. Some numbers:

- i have an Linksys WRT320N at home. Raw performace measured with
   iperf between win and linux is about 800Mbps.
- real performance is much worse, copying from my win server to my linux
   box (win share mounted on linux), gives about 500 Mbps
- as music server, if you use mp3 even at 320 Kbps, you can serve about
   1500 simultaneous streams... at 100Mb, only 150 ;)
- if you play videos for example mounting a shared drive on clients:
   playing an mkv HD video, that totem says is compressed about 3MBps,
   uses a bit more, about 4Mbps (read via samba client from linux),
   so bandwith is pretty fine even at 100Mb
- the only problem is when you want to copy a big file and don't want to
   wait... that is where gigabit really pays off. Copying a 1.2 Gb file
   took 30 secs on gigabit, that means 300 on 100Mb, so five minutes..
   
So, for usual media streaming, you are fine at 100, but for heavy file
movement, gigabit is worth it.

You can leave your router alone, and get a decent giga switch for
about 100 euros.

http://www.appinformatica.com/hubs-switch-linksys-switch-8p-10-100-1000.php
http://www.appinformatica.com/hubs-switch-connection-switch-rack-19-16ptos-10-100-1000.php

(sorry for the spanish shop, but it was what I know well)


-- 
J.A. Magallon <jamagallon()ono!com>        \               Winter is coming...